1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of electronic data interchange (EDI) and more particularly to the field of formatting EDI envelopes in an EDI transaction.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) relates to the exchange of commercial data in a uniform format between business partners in order facilitate business transactions. Prior to EDI, business partners communicated through paper transactions. Typical paper transactions included quotes, purchase orders, and invoices. As business partners automated operations through computer information systems, paper transactions persisted between business partners wherein the computer information system of one business partner produced paper transactions while the other business partner re-keyed the data in the paper transactions into the computer information system for the recipient business partner.
The re-keying of important transaction data from a paper transaction from a sending business partner into a computer information system of a receiving business partner can be susceptible to human error resulting in improperly keyed data that differs from the data in the computer information system of the sending business partner. Additionally, substantially processing delays can result where human intervention in re-keying business data from a paper transaction is required. EDI provides relief from both human operator error and processing delays by facilitating a purely electronic, automated exchange of business data, thereby obviating the need for a paper transaction.
In EDI, a recipient business partner publishes a set of acceptable EDI transactions and a corresponding format. Transmitting business partners can format internal, commercial data into the published format and can transmit the data to the recipient partner over either the Internet, or more traditionally a value added network. In either case, the recipient partner can receive the properly formatted data and can automatically provide the data as input to an internal data processing system. Thereafter, the intermediary facilitating the exchange between the business partners can be compensated for the transaction.
More specifically, commercial data can be assembled into a form and formatted according to an acceptable format published by the intended recipient business partner. Once assembled, the form can be inserted as a transaction into an EDI envelope. Subsequently, the EDI envelope can be addressed to the target business partner and transmitted to the target business partner. Asynchronously, the target business partner can retrieve the EDI envelope from the inbox and process the form contained therein. Notably, so as to economize on transaction costs, the EDI envelope can include multiple transactions. In this regard, the transactions can be processed in batch mode when received by the target business partner.
At present, the business transactions can be formatted in many different ways. Traditional formats include the extensible markup language (XML), EDI native format and record oriented data (ROD). The enveloping component of the EDI interchange generally is configured to handle one of the formats. Specifically, within a given EDI envelope, all transactions must be formatted uniformly. As such, to the extent that transactions are formatted differently, the differently formatted transactions must be sent in different envelopes, thereby defeating the cost-effectiveness of packaging multiple transactions in a single envelope.